Veronica Ryan OBE RA

About the artist

Veronica Ryan’s work elicits a wealth of histories, meanings and multiplicities which she describes as bearing powerful ‘residues, traces, memory and deposits.’ Her works’ deep psychological subtext resists narrow categorisation, as she tussles with oppositional principles such as interior and exterior, absence and presence, container and contained.

Ryan’s interest in organic forms has remained constant since the 1980s. An early sculptural ensemble, Attempts to Fill Vacant Spaces (1986), comprises an octet of bronze pods nesting plaster flowers and husks; the Carrara marble block of Mango Reliquary (2000) is set with 20 mango stones covered in lead foil. In 2021, Ryan unveiled in Hackney, London, large bronze and marble outdoor works Custard Apple (Annonaceae), Breadfruit (Moraceae) and Soursop (Annonaceae), as the nation’s first permanent sculpture to celebrate the Windrush generation. For this, and Ryan’s critically acclaimed 2021 solo exhibition ‘Along a Spectrum’, at Spike Island, Bristol, Ryan was nominated and won the 2022 Turner Prize.

While Ryan has frequently drawn upon this natural taxonomy, she has refused to define the specific connotations of such forms. Seed pods and fruits have been used interchangeably to allude to the historic circulation of produce and people; to cycles of life, death and rebirth; to concerns over environmental breakdown; as well as notions of personal history, intergenerational exchange and inherited trauma.

This fluidity of meaning is exemplary of the manner in which Ryan’s ideas float through her distinct bodies of work: everything is connected, all is in flux. (When discussing her broad practice, Ryan references the interconnectedness of root systems: ‘I think I have a subterranean way of thinking.’ ) It is for this reason that, even when Ryan reorients her focus from organic matter to man-made objects, she remains attentive to the residue and accretion of experienced life.

Exhibitions include ‘Compartments/Apart-ments (1992)’, Camden Art Centre (1995); ‘Donachie Rhodes Ryan’, Freelands Foundation (2019); ‘Along a Spectrum’, Spike Island, Bristol (2021); ‘Artist in Residence 2000’, Tate St Ives; and ‘Unruly Objects’, Pulitzer Arts Foundation (2025).